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It is the corporeal, then, that demands magnitude: the
Ideal-Forms of body are Ideas installed in Mass.
But these Ideas enter, not into Magnitude itself but into some
subject that has been brought to Magnitude. For to suppose them
entering into Magnitude and not into Matter- is to represent them
as being either without Magnitude and without Real-Existence [and
therefore undistinguishable from the Matter] or not Ideal-Forms
[apt to body] but Reason-Principles [utterly removed] whose
sphere could only be Soul; at this, there would be no such thing
as body [i.e., instead of Ideal-Forms shaping Matter and so
producing body, there would be merely Reason-Principles dwelling
remote in Soul.]
The multiplicity here must be based upon some unity which, since
it has been brought to Magnitude, must be, itself, distinct from
Magnitude. Matter is the base of Identity to all that is
composite: once each of the constituents comes bringing its own
Matter with it, there is no need of any other base. No doubt
there must be a container, as it were a place, to receive what is
to enter, but Matter and even body precede place and space; the
primal necessity, in order to the existence of body, is Matter.
There is no force in the suggestion that, since production and
act are immaterial, corporeal entities also must be immaterial.
Bodies are compound, actions not. Further, Matter does in some
sense underlie action; it supplies the substratum to the doer: it
is permanently within him though it does not enter as a
constituent into the act where, indeed, it would be a hindrance.
Doubtless, one act does not change into another- as would be the
case if there were a specific Matter of actions- but the doer
directs himself from one act to another so that he is the Matter,
himself, to his varying actions.
Matter, in sum, is necessary to quality and to quantity, and,
therefore, to body.
It is, thus, no name void of content; we know there is such a
base, invisible and without bulk though it be.
If we reject it, we must by the same reasoning reject qualities
and mass: for quality, or mass, or any such entity, taken by
itself apart, might be said not to exist. But these do exist,
though in an obscure existence: there is much less ground for
rejecting Matter, however it lurk, discerned by none of the
senses.
It eludes the eye, for it is utterly outside of colour: it is not
heard, for it is no sound: it is no flavour or savour for
nostrils or palate: can it, perhaps, be known to touch? No: for
neither is it corporeal; and touch deals with body, which is
known by being solid, fragile, soft, hard, moist, dry- all
properties utterly lacking in Matter.
It is grasped only by a mental process, though that not an act of
the intellective mind but a reasoning that finds no subject; and
so it stands revealed as the spurious thing it has been called.
No bodiliness belongs to it; bodiliness is itself a phase of
Reason-Principle and so is something different from Matter, as
Matter, therefore, from it: bodiliness already operative and so
to speak made concrete would be body manifest and not Matter
unelaborated.
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